


Longest Nights

by Citagazze



Category: Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Background Relationships, F/M, Family, Gen, Platonic Relationships, Post-Canon, Yuletide 2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-02-28 20:06:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2745341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Citagazze/pseuds/Citagazze
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In December of 1825, storms brew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Longest Nights

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alley_Skywalker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alley_Skywalker/gifts).



1825

The weeks before Nikolai's name day – both of the Nikolais, Rostov and Bolkonski – were busier that year than ever before. Natasha and Pierre were the first to appear, of course, arriving with their children not long after the first snow. Their visits had become less frequent since the death of Countess Rostova two years before, and Sonya felt warmed by their arrival, despite the tension that seemed to be gathering in the house like early morning fog on the hills outside. Denisov was the next guest, solitary as ever. He was a fixture at all of Nikolai Rostov's name days, of course, just another old friend, but his presence seemed less congruous than it had once. He and Nikolai rarely spoke, and in the evenings when they, Pierre, and Nikolai Bolkonski gathered in the study to speak of the events in Petersburg, all four emerged grim-faced and silent.

It was understandable for Nikolai to be more short-tempered than usual, Sonya reasoned. Little Mitya had taken ill in late November, and Marya rarely left his bedside. There was no great danger, they all knew, but the Rostovs always took more care over their children than any other family Sonya knew.

Besides that, the news from the capital was enough to upset anyone. It upset Nikolai, certainly, who rarely took time for his books anymore, just scowlingly withdrew to join his wife's vigil, leaving his guests to sit and murmur amongst themselves. Sonya felt she could forgive her cousin everything, even then, even when it felt sometimes that he was the shoreline and she was sailing farther and farther away, watching him disappear into a clouded past. There was a whole world they had shared once, made up of kisses in darkened rooms and tearful promises, but it was tucked so deeply in her memory that it almost seemed a fantasy. It was hard to imagine, certainly, that her life had ever been so like some sentimental opera.

The guests who were next to arrive were Bolkonski's friends. Even at twenty, the young man was still reserved and rarely went into society even during his time in the city. Nonetheless, a few of his Petersburg friends had come by for the name day celebration, a tightly knit group of bright young intellectuals. They were radicals too, Sonya realized after spending only minutes in their company. They talked of nothing but politics and treated Pierre, who remained quietly bemused by their behavior, with an almost comical deference.

Bolkonski's friends, with their quiet, intense conversations did nothing to ease the tension in Bald Hills. The whole household was like a pane of glass with spiderweb cracks running through it – a breath of wind could send it shattering. Even the children were subdued; none were young enough to miss the unease.

 

It wasn't, in the end, a breath of wind that shattered the peace; it was closer to someone hurling a stone through the already cracked window. Nearly a week after St. Nicholas' day, when nearly all the guests were still in Bald Hills, a new set of visitors arrived.

These were friends of Pierre's, and, the others gathered, members of his "society." They were a mixture of officers and civil servants, some traveling with their wives, but most alone. Sonya could pick a few familiar faces from among them, older now than when she had known seen them in Moscow or Petersburg, but still recognizable.

If Bolkonski's friends had irritated Nikolai, he had kept his tongue. As soon as Pierre's began to arrive, he lost his patience.

“This is my house," he hissed to Pierre the first day a pair of officers arrived. Sonya, who was looking for Masha with the cloak she had mended, became still when she overheard. "I will not be keeping traitors here – don't you have Petersburg for this kind of meeting?

Pierre's laughter was surprisingly gentle. "Petersburg is as much in flames these days as Moscow was thirteen years ago." His voice was wry. "There are arrests made every day of my allies, but you are a man known for keeping your nose out of revolutions. Besides that, you are an old friend and my wife's brother. I trust my friends are safe here for just a few more days."

Nikolai's eyes flashed, but in the expression that crossed his face, Sonya caught as much fear and regret as anger. "I have told you before, Pierre," he replied steadily. "My duty is to the tsar, and with Alexander gone, that means I cannot allow you and your – secret groups – to undermine Nicholas. I will not stand idly by–" He noticed Sonya at last and his expression softened slightly. "Masha is with Mademoiselle Louise and Andrusha," he said with a quick nod at the cloak in Sonya's hands.

She turned a quick smile his way and left, her footsteps soft.

 

The final “visitor” arrived a few days after the rest, making his first appearance when all the guests had gathered in the drawing room. Sonya waited, poised by the samovar as ever, listening to their discussion.

"It's only wasting time to put faith in Muraviev's philosophy," one of Pierre's friends complained. "He may have the trust of the officers, but when they decide to place real power in his hands, how long will his love for the 'social contract' last?"

"He sees himself as another Wobespiewe," Denisov scoffed. "Well, he won't have my head.

One of the younger men, a stout boy with red hair, snorted loudly, leading Bolkonski to shoot him a cautioning glance. "Oh, and you'd throw in your lot with Pestel? He'd have us under a tyrant!" the redhead exclaimed

“A tempowawy measuwe–"

"They're all temporary measures." This came from the last arrival, walking unevenly into the room and pulling off his dark coat and hat as he spoke. Sonya caught her breath as she recognized Fyodor Dolokhov, then felt inexplicably embarrassed by her reaction. She had been little more than a child when she had seen him last, and had rarely thought of him since. He had fallen out with Nikolai, who never spoke well of him. In the twenty years since he had professed his love for Sonya, new lines had gathered around his strange, thin, mouth, and his curly hair was not as bright or thick as it once had been, but his eyes were as cold and hard as they had ever been. He moved with a heavy limp, but did not sit, only leaned slightly against a table. “What does it matter whose name it is we’re shouting when the guns go off? We will have our fight, and that is what matters. If it’s Pestel’s republic or _Constantine and constitution_ –” He shrugged, a quick, ugly motion.

There were no servants in the room, so Sonya took advantage of the resulting disturbance to take Dolokhov’s heavy greatcoat, which was wet from mostly-melted snow. He glanced at her, seeming to only notice her then, and an inscrutable expression crossed his face

Pierre’s deep voice rose over the others as Sonya made her way back to her accustomed position after hanging the coat, but she didn’t hear his words. She was distracted instead by the darkness in Nikolai’s face. During these meetings he had taken to standing, arms folded, leaning against the bookshelf. It seemed to be his quietly aggressive protest against the interlopers. Now he stood with stiffened posture, his anger clearly only a flicker away from surfacing. His eyes darted from face to face, then he breathed in sharply and stalked out of the room.

The din faded to a silence that lasted only a moment before the group returned to its clamorous debate. Something about Speranski, something about the royal guards, something about the Union of Salvation – for all Sonya had absorbed from conversation, when the words flew fast and hard, she could barely make sense of what was being said. Pierre stood, and with his size it was still impossible for the movement to pass unnoticed. Still, he indicated with a vague motion for the conversation to continue without him, and he did his best to make his way over to Sonya without disturbing the flow of conversation.

“Go speak to him,” he said in a low voice.

Sonya studied his broad, earnest face. Pierre was a good man, and still dear to Sonya in a way, but at times it felt like his understanding of the great, sweeping movements of the world obscured its details. “I don’t believe he wants to speak to anyone right now,” she said, equally softly.

Pierre’s brow creased with concern. “Of course. And I want to trust Nikolai. He is, after all, an old friend. But I’m afraid that I have misjudged many things in choosing to gather my friends here.” Catching Sonya’s questioning look, he amended, “My allies, I suppose. Isn’t it strange– Well, that’s not the concern. Just, please... Try speaking with him.” He took Sonya’s thin hands in his own huge ones.  
What was his fear? That Nikolai would leave then, go to the capital and betray them all? It wasn’t unthinkable, Sonya thought as her stomach twisted. As she murmured to Pierre that she would try and excused herself from the room, she noticed again pair of hard blue eyes on her.

 

Nikolai was in his study. Though the door was not fully closed, Sonya lingered just outside it, one thumb running along a groove in the doorframe. _Do not still be angry_ , she prayed. _Do not turn that anger on me._ She rapped lightly at the door and counted her own breaths until Nikolai called, “Come in.” She couldn’t gauge the tone of his voice. He sat at his desk, a pen in his hand. The hand was moving, but he must have only been making small lines or scribbles on the paper, for his eyes never watched the motion at all. His jaw was set in an ugly grimace.

The first thing she wanted to tell him was _Pierre told me to speak to you_. That would do nothing, she realized, but anger him more. Where to begin, then?

“They shouldn’t have come,” Nikolai said, not waiting for her to speak first. “Any of them.”

“You can’t turn against your sister’s family,” Sonya said finally, wondering at her own forwardness. “Her friends. And your friends, too–"

“You’re siding with them?” Nikolai’s anger was always explosive, even after years of family life had softened him. The only movement he could make, however, was to slam down his pen, an impotent gesture. Sonya noted in shock a look of pure desperation in his eyes before the fury took its place again. “These are not friends. Captain Dolokhov,” he snarled, the title a brittle insult, “is no friend of mine, or Pierre’s. You remember when they dueled? Vaska wouldn’t have a word with either or them if it weren’t for their absurd _societies_. Bolkonski’s friends are schoolchildren who think they can change our whole country and, none of them stop to think where this leaves everyone who doesn’t eat and drink revolutionary ideals.” There was a crackling noise as he crumpled the sheet of paper. “There are _duties_...” he said feebly.

All at once, Sonya understood those moments of fear.

“To your family,” she said, knowing that wasn’t what he had been about to say but knowing all the same that it had been what he meant.

Nikolai exhaled slowly, his eyes not focused on Sonya or anything else.

He had every reason to be terrified that he would be found to be a traitor to his country, complicit in plans to overthrow the tsar – When Russian men talked of republics, they spoke anticipating their next words to come from bleeding mouths. Nikolai stood on the precipice of losing everything and everyone he had spent years and years gathering around him. With one gunshot, Marya would be alone again, her children without support. Not all traitors were executed, of course; he could be sent to Siberia and every ruble that had built his pride would be wasted.

All this tumbled through Sonya’s mind, but one thought stood starkly apart from this understanding. _It is my family too._ Through only the thinnest link of blood, of course, but family still: Nikolai and Marya, Andrusha and Natasha and Mitya. But then, there was Natasha and Pierre, Petya and Masha and Lisa and Katya. She loved every one of them more than could ever be returned by all of them together.

“I don’t want to lose anyone,” she said, aware of how frail a statement that was. “Not you, but not Natasha either, Natasha or Pierre.”

Nikolai’s breathing was still long and audible. He bowed his head so his brow rested in his hands, his eyes hidden. “Sonya,” he said. “Neither do I. There’s duty to the government, but, God help me, I couldn’t–– I want them all out of this house, but I want them to give up on this whole..” he sat back again, gesturing broadly. “I thought they might give it up if they thought I was an enemy. And I really thought I could be, but I do have some loyalty, you know.”

_No one doubted your loyalty_ , Sonya thought, _only where it lay_.

Then Nikolai started, his eyes on something behind Sonya.

“What a noble secret.” Sonya turned quickly and was startled to see Dolokhov there, his lips twisted in his strange, humorless smile. She was amazed that, with his unsteady hobble and heavy boots, he was still able to come up behind her unnoticed. And besides that, she wondered, why would he have left the gathering in the drawing room. “Don’t worry, I don’t intend to tell anyone.”

Nikolai stood suddenly, his pine wood chair scraping against the floor. “My loyalty does not extent to you,” he said. Sonya had never heard such a cold anger in his voice; he always seemed to burn with a hot choler when enraged. “You’ve shown what your friendship is worth, so I wouldn’t waste a moment in hesitation if I could have you sent to Siberia without denouncing the rest.”

“For something twenty years in the past? You never seemed the type to hold grudges. Did a friends’ quarrel turn you so wholly–”

“Twenty years ago–” Nikolai began, a furious interruption, but stopped, composing himself. “Sonya, if you’ll excuse us,” he said, then, with incongruous softness, “Thank you.”

With an uneasy nod, she slipped again out of the room.

 

Sonya sat for some quarter of an hour with Natasha and her daughters, listening to her cousin talk merrily about Nikolai Bolkonski’s prospects for marriage. “One of his friends was teasing him about the young Princess Drubetskaya, Boris’ daughter,” she explained cheerfully. “I’ve never met the girl, but I’ve heard she takes after her father in looks. That must mean she’s inherited his luck as well!”

When Natasha laughed, Sonya laughed along, because she remembered once having an absurd jealousy of Julie – now Drubetskaya, then Karagina – and it was hard to imagine anything more distant or trivial now.

It was equally hard to imagine young Bolkonski leaving, marrying. For all his intelligence, he seemed to have been a child for so long. He reminded Sonya sometimes of herself, not for his thoughtful sensitivity but for his position: an orphan living on the mercy of an aunt and uncle who already had their own children to care for. Of course, he was Nikolai Bolkonski, heir to what was once one of the most honored titles in the country, not a nameless young girl. He could pursue his wealthy and rumored-beautiful princess to his heart’s content, if his friends’ jesting was even true.

“I’d like to see him married soon. He might not look so dour all the time. Of course, that’s as long as... Well,” said Natasha. There was a surprising steel in her eyes that reminded Sonya of the days before Prince Andrei’s death. She wanted to hug her cousin then, the woman who had become so distant and different from the beautiful young girl who had once been her confidant in everything. There was a terrible truth walking the halls of Bald Hills, but Natasha would laugh and scorn it for as long as she was able. In less than a week, they all knew, the men would ride away to Petersburg, and then...“Well,” she repeated, undeterred. “That reminds me, what _has_ become of Boris Drubetskoy? I haven’t heard a word of him in years. Do you suppose he’s been poisoned by some disgruntled diplomat?”

“Mama, you shouldn’t talk about poisoning in front of the children,” Masha said with a prim nod at her younger sisters, as though she were vastly older and wiser than they. The women glanced at each other and dissolved into mirth.

“Oh,” Natasha whispered between peals of laughter, a sound as pure and childish as it had ever been. “Sonya, in days I could be a widow and I’m laughing about poison.” She was still giggling between words, but tears stood glittering in her dark eyes. “Sonya, it’s all too much.”

Sonya remembered a line of verse from her youth. _Death be not proud._ If Death was indeed lurking by the door, he would see a graying mother and spinster laughing at him until they cried. Sonya sobered quickly, another line line running through her mind. _And soonest our best men with thee do go._

 

The image stayed with Sonya all throughout the evening, and when she saw a dark figure coming from the end of the hall as she went to enter her bedroom, she thought for a moment that her heart would stop. Even before the man reached the dim light pooling from within her room, she recognized the limping gait. The relief lasted only a moment, as she realized there were few people she would rather talk to less.

“Sofia Alexandrovna,” Dolokhov said in his clear voice. “I wanted to thank you.”  
She felt almost ashamed of the artifice in her smile, as though she were a girl again and enjoying his attentions without a thought of the consequences. Now she was wary, without fully understanding why. “What for?”

As he reached to smooth a curl of fair hair, Sonya thought she saw a tremor in his broad hand. This was not the man who had shown her that attention before. War – not the brief tours of many men, but decades in the same bloodstained pattern – had changed the shape of his hardness, the cast of his pitiless eyes.

“For speaking to your cousin. I know you still love him.”

Sonya folded her arms protectively over her chest. “I gave up on hope of marrying him years ago,” she said, shocked again by her own frankness. Something about the man, so strange and opposite from the world she had always known, seemed to transfigure something in her blood. It was not an attraction, but it was an undefinable significance. “Before he married the countess, I mean. I think I knew there wasn’t really any reason to hope from the beginning.”

“You are still so good,” said Dolokhov in a tone of wonderment. She knew they were both thinking of his proposal, and perhaps of a life where she had responded differently. “I have always thought of you, since the last time we met.” Whenever he had to speak of love, his words became stilted, the sentences plain and completely bare of his usual irony. Perhaps that explained the feeling of gravity; this plainness was something shared between only the two. “You know that I care for very few people.”

Sonya breathed in sharply, squeezing her own arms in her hands. “I care for very many people.” The whole home. The Bezukhovs and the Rostovs, every person in the two households. She would care for the dead, too, if no one else would. With a tenderness she wasn’t sure the man deserved, she added, “You as well.”

“I can’t ask anything of you, because I won’t return from Petersburg,” said Dolokhov, smiling sardonically again. “I’ve spilled my fair share of blood, and I can’t wait forever for some of it to be mine.” He seemed to have forgotten his duel with Pierre, and whatever wound had left him with his hobbling limp. “I suppose we both know when hoping is wasting our time.”

It was only because the hallway was so dark she had mistaken this man for Death, and only because she could feel that queer significance beating in the pulse at her wrists that Sonya stepped forward at that moment and kissed him.

 

When the men rode off, Nikolai had not said a word. He had written no letters, though he spoke again and again of duty and oaths to the tsar. He stayed inside, an arm around Natasha. Mitya was much better, and it took both of his parents to keep him indoors when the Petersburg party made their goodbyes. Sonya stood outside, snow swirling around her, imagining she could hear the hoofbeats long after the horses disappeared over the hills.

**Author's Note:**

> I can find little evidence that any of John Donne’s work had been translated into either French or, still less likely, Russian by the early nineteenth century. The poem, however, was stuck in my head. Suspend your disbelief, I suppose.


End file.
